Leigh Ledare is an artist working with photography, archives, video, and text.

The Gift is an edition of an amateur softcore fetish spanking movie that his mother, Tina Peterson, a former ballerina, shot with two friends. The artist explains:

The story was so flawed that the tapes sat for 2 years without being able to be made into anything. One day a package arrived with the mail at my door. Inside were two tapes and a small note from my mother telling me they were a gift and now it was my responsibility to make something out of them. I edited out the failed story the initial artists had attempted to film and left my mother playing to the direction of these two men, leaving what can be seen as a real armature for the missing narrative.